


it’s a terrible love

by evilythedwarf



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 02:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4859423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evilythedwarf/pseuds/evilythedwarf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She could still be happy. She could still find love. She’d just never be whole. [AU in which your body bares the scars of your soulmate.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	it’s a terrible love

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this tumblr post](http://mauscapade.tumblr.com/post/126678369134/anabelsbrother-cahrroty-istumogra): “maybe the little bruises and cuts that show up on your body seemingly out of nowhere are actually little injuries that happened to your soulmate and you get the same marks on your skin as them”

It happened sometimes, not often, not like that, but it did happen and there was nothing to be done.

She could still be happy. She could still find love.

She’d just never be whole.

Her mother had wept, with exhaustion and relief, as all new mothers do. She’d held her close, counted fingers and toes and kissed the top of her head while her strong, solid hands had examined every centimeter of her skin. She had felt the lines crisscrossing her back, that marred her beautiful, perfect, newborn’s skin, her eyes filling with tears once again, not of relief, this time, but of fear and anxiety and a thousand questions that would forever go unanswered.  

Claire couldn’t possibly remember the day she was born, but if she closed her eyes, if she tried hard enough, she might just be able to imagine it. She was a mother herself, after all, and no stranger to the miracle of new life. Nor to the crippling fear that inhabited her chest during those interminable seconds between the birth of her child and the moment the squirming infant was placed on her chest.

She didn’t mind the scars, as a child. They pulled, sometimes, when she’d wake up in the mornings and stretch her arms over her head and felt the familiar and always unwelcome sharp tug on her skin, but it was barely a moment, just a reminder that they were as much a part of her as her feet or the freckles on her nose.

Others felt differently.

They pitied her, crossed themselves when they saw, thanked their lucky stars and everything that was holy that it wasn’t them, that they weren’t tainted with the knowledge that the other half of their soul was long gone, dead before they were born, left them to drift astray and alone for their entire lives.

Claire didn’t feel alone. She didn’t feel astray, she didn’t feel anything but happy and secure in the love her parents had for her and for each other. She could barely remember their faces sometimes, but she remembered that.

And when she laid awake at night, missing them, at 6 and 7 and 8, she’d cover her head with a pillow and think about the way they looked at each other and the way they looked at her, about the scar over her father’s right eyebrow and the matching one on her mother’s face.

“How did you get it?” She had asked her.

“I didn’t,” her mother had said. She had hugged her to her chest and told her, about people and connections, about meant to be and destiny.

That had been the first time Claire had wondered, the first hints of awareness. It was also one of the few conversations she could recall having with her mother.

She didn’t mind the scars, when she was a child, but she did wonder.

Uncle Lamb, though, was of a different opinion altogether.

“It makes no difference, darling, what’s written on your skin,” he told her, not looking at her but focused on the dirt he was carefully brushing away. She knelt beside him, holding his tools, patient and still, against her nature, for all she wanted was to move, to dig her hands into the soil and see what all the fuss was about, to get it done and move on, keep moving, until they had moved so far away, until they had reached a place where it really didn’t matter, where it really didn’t make a difference.

Even at 10 years old, Claire knew words carried no weight, and words wouldn’t cure the chronic loneliness in her uncle’s eyes.

“No difference at all, in the end,” he said, and she’d get distracted tracing her eyes over the fine lines that covered the insides of his wrists. They weren’t his, Uncle Lamb would never, but they hurt him all the same.

Claire, at 13, 14, couldn’t have known about girls in the schoolyard, pinching their forearms, so hard it made them cry, and looking around, anxious, desperate, in a hurry to find the boy with a matching bruise. Pulling up shirtsleeves and giggling.

She couldn’t have known about girls who woke up with bruises on their knees, with  half healed split lips, who woke up with a smile, because they didn’t know them, they didn’t know where, but somewhere, out there, there was someone for them.

She couldn’t have known about the girls who hid their marks because they knew all too well who had the matching ones and didn’t want to get into trouble, didn’t want to be different, didn’t want to know they would never find a boy to marry and have babies with.

Claire was careless, unobservant, she spent very little time worrying over other people’s skin. She’d fall down and brush off her scrapes and scratches, because she knew that there was no point in looking for someone she was never going to find. She didn’t mind it, much, but sometimes, she’d wrap her arms around herself, and the tips of her fingers would skim over the lines on her back, and she thought about the man who never was, the one who had left her before she’d ever found him.

In the mornings though, she’d shake her head and forget about it. There was always something to be done, places to be explored, books to read and things to learn. And every few weeks there was Uncle Lamb to convince about her permanence by his side. She was too old, now, to be dressing like a boy and sleeping in a tent, and he had been talking about sending her back home to school (to England, he meant, a place she barely remembered and hadn’t set foot in in a dozen years). Her temper tantrums were hardly dignified but they worked, and he relented, and she didn’t have to go back to a place where she’d be alone, utterly and completely alone.

Until she knew she wouldn’t be.

Claire, at 18, dressed in the same dirty trousers she’d been wearing all week, had tripped and ripped them at the knee. She hurt her hand too, a long cut on her left palm, and she was on the floor, people walking past her, when a man stopped in front of her.

“Are you alright?” he asked her.

She didn’t look up, busy trying to get the bits of sand and gravel from the cut when he offered her a very clean, very white handkerchief.

“Thank you,” she said.

It wasn’t until later, when she had walked him to Uncle Lamb’s temporary office when she’d realized he hadn’t stopped staring at her.

“What?” she’d asked him, irritated, and he’d shown her his left palm, a red line across it.

“Oh.”

Uncle Lamb hadn’t wanted her to go. For all that he’d been talking about school and home, and growing up, he hadn’t wanted to part with her, had told her a soulmate was no guarantee, that she had a good life, and didn’t she want to see the world? Isn’t that what she dreamt about?

“Why, Claire?”

And she’d taken his forearm in her hands and turned it, and she’d placed a hand over his wrist.

“Because it does matter,” she told him.

She hadn’t often touched him, over the years, and his skin was tough, leathery, darker than her own, and warm, so warm, and she wished, later, that she had hugged him more.  He had been her parent, her friend, her companion, and she missed him, always, but she’d had a taste of what destiny was like, and Frank’s love was intoxicating and enveloping, and only for her.

It was so different, being loved by Frank. Claire was young, but she wasn’t quite as innocent as her uncle liked to believe. She’d kissed men, made love to them, laid with them in stolen moments, hiding, away from prying eyes and while it had been lovely and fun, no one had ever needed her like Frank did and she knew that no one else ever would.

“I’m sorry,” she’d told him, the first time, when he’d finished unbuttoning her shirt and it fell down beside her, when his hands, large and heavy, raked through her messy curls, when he turned her around and gasped. “I’m sorry.”

He kissed her, hotly and passionately, and he didn’t seem to care that she was so clearly not meant for him like he was meant for her. But he never touched her back and she didn’t mind, much.

She grew careful, after, because every mark on his body reminded her of the absence of marks on hers. He didn’t care he said, he loved her, he said, and he knew she loved him as well. And she did, of course she did, because he was everything she thought she was never going to have, and he gave her a home, a solid body to cling to, and he was there, constant and steadfast.

Until he wasn’t.

Until they were separated by kilometers and secrecy, and she didn’t know, she couldn’t know, if he was even alive or hurt. It wasn’t until then that she understood why the other girls in the hospital would bite the backs of their hands and wait, sometimes for hours, sometimes forever, until a half moon of teeth would appear on the opposite hand. There was comfort in knowing, and Claire was denied it by the same fate that so freely gave it to everyone around her.

They were strangers, after the war. She had changed too much, perhaps, or maybe he had changed too little. Maybe he expected her to still believe it was enough, his soul connected to hers, when she didn’t know how or when she’d moved past the need to belong to him, to belong to anyone.

She loved him enough to make it work. She believed they could have made it work. If fate hadn’t intervened.

Fate, which seemed to have it in for her since the moment she was born.

Confused and afraid, and more than a little willing to believe it was all just a massive hallucination she’d found herself in, her instincts still kicked in, and she was popping shoulder joints back into place and cleaning up wounds, because that was the same, everywhere, anytime. She could do that, among the chaos that surrounded her, the unfamiliar faces, the danger and uncertainty. That was easy to focus on, that was something she could do.

Until she noticed the bruises and the half scabbed slash across her chest and she wondered when she’d got hurt, because surely, surely she would have noticed, surely she would know. But if there was something Claire excelled at, it was brushing things off and moving forward, even when the world had turned on its head.

But then she touched him, gently, without the rush of having to make sure she was keeping him alive. She touched him, Jamie, she traced the lines on his back with fingers that were sure and steady, even as every sound had disappeared, but that of her heartbeat pounding in her ears.

Lines that were rough and raised over skin that may have once been smooth and soft, skin that was warm and alive under her hands, so terrifyingly alive, in front of her. It couldn’t be. Of all the impossible things that had happened to her, Jamie seemed the most unbelievable of them.

She finished his bandages, with as sure a hand as she could, and she fought the urge to cry because not then, not there, not when she had a husband to go back to and a life to build, it couldn’t happen to her. She understood, for the first time, that it was more than skin deep signs, it was fear and awe, and want.

She wanted to take of what was left of her dress, wanted to tell him to look, look at her, look at what you’ve done to me because somehow, inexplicably, she had found something she hadn’t been looking for.

She didn’t, though.

Claire wept in his arms, she took comfort from and gave nothing in return because she didn’t know, she couldn’t have known, then, about the burning in his chest, but she watched him, closely, watched as every single scrape and bump would reflect on her skin and she couldn’t help the growing warmth in her belly.

It didn’t even occur to her to test it, to find out, to slash her forearm and see, because the thought that he wouldn’t be for her was perhaps more frightening that knowing he would be, that he would carry her on his skin as long as she did on hers, and the warmth began to burn, began to make her bold and careless and she wanted him, and it scared her, because Frank, there was Frank, out there, somewhere, waiting for her, feeling her the way she felt Jamie.

Until he was there, in front of her, and she still didn’t know, she still wasn’t sure. The wedding was so fast, the ceremonial slash on her wrist too quick for her to see anything, and the whole day too blurry and her mind too full of doubts. But then his skin was hers, for her to do with as she pleased, and he asked for nothing, absolutely nothing in return save for honesty.

She bit her lip, and she took off her shift, and she would remember, with affection and more than a hint of amusement, the way his eyes almost bulged out of their sockets, and the way his fists clenched, and she would remember the catch in his voice when she turned around, when she showed him that she was his, had been from the beginning, and would be for the rest of her days.


End file.
